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| Sunday 22 Sep: Rioters set fire to barricades after vandalising Shatin MTR |
Vandalism continues … and yet the western media and the likes of Nancy Pelosi celebrate these "freedom fighters". The rioters continue to target working class areas of Hong Kong, so the biggest victims are poor and working class people and all the shop owners who had to close down yesterday.
This is a dreary weekly occurrence these days.
Sentencing starts…there have been some sentencing of the thousand-odd arrestees, and concerns that the sentences have been too lenient. I don’t know. I haven’t looked into it. For now I’m assuming that the courts and judges acted in accordance with the rule of law. Whether light sentences “incite” further violence is a question; my feeling is that those torching our streets aren’t considering what the penalties might be.
Sentencing starts…there have been some sentencing of the thousand-odd arrestees, and concerns that the sentences have been too lenient. I don’t know. I haven’t looked into it. For now I’m assuming that the courts and judges acted in accordance with the rule of law. Whether light sentences “incite” further violence is a question; my feeling is that those torching our streets aren’t considering what the penalties might be.
And universal suffrage misses… (one of the Five Demands). I’ve noted before that there was a chance back in 2015 to make concrete steps forward to election of the Chief Executive and many of what are called here the “functional constituencies” (cynics call them “rotten boroughs”). But because it wasn’t everything they demanded the pan-Democratic parties rejected the proposals. I remember that very well. And I remember being shocked that they’d rejected a move forward. It wasn’t perfect but it was something. Yet again we had a case of “ perfection the enemy of action…”.
Alex Lo talks of this today, and of Hong Kong's continued “regulatory capture” by the FIRE sectors in Hong Kong: Finance, Insurance and Real Estate.
Let us recall that the government’s reform package was not only about the method of electing the chief executive. It also opened a path to reforming the legislature in the following years. That was our first and maybe only chance of ever turning all, or at least most, Legco seats into directly elected ones, starting from next year. That was what we could have been arguing now instead of having our children throw petrol bombs at police. [here]
